


Some Things

by wisekrakens



Category: Stargate - All Series, Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-06
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2017-12-10 13:55:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/786790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wisekrakens/pseuds/wisekrakens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are some things SGC gate team members notice about the Atlantis teams who come to Earth on rotation. Nothing alarming. Nothing worth bringing to the brass’s attention. Different galaxies leave different scars, after all, and if the world’s gonna keep getting saved the people doing the saving are going to have to learn to tolerate each other’s quirks.</p><p>But still. There are things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A friend wanted fic highlighting some of the changes Pegasus makes on those people it takes. I obliged, because I'm a big softie like that.  
> Lantean mourning lanterns flagrantly stolen from yet another friend.

There are some things SGC gate team members notice about the Atlantis teams who come to Earth on rotation. Nothing alarming. Nothing worth bringing to the brass’s attention. Different galaxies leave different scars, after all, and if the world’s gonna keep getting saved the people doing the saving are going to have to learn to tolerate each other’s quirks.

But still. There are things.

The Lanteans group together, even when there’s no need. Especially when there’s no need. In a whole wide empty mess, a scientist will sit down across from a sergeant he hates and they will… converse. Pleasantly. About the weather.

The memory makes cold spiders crawl up Corporal Barnes’s spine.

Captain Lopez sometimes finds himself walking past the locker room after AR 5 gets cleared by medical. He also sometimes hears a woman singing in a short, deep language he thinks is probably Satedan. One time, he stands against the wall for five minutes humming along to a call and response.

After being captured and brought aboard a ha’tak, SG 7 watches AR 4 pull knives and tools of every conceivable material from every conceivable hiding place, up to and including threaded through their slightly-longer-than-regulation hair. AR 4’s engineer opens the cell door with a multi tool she’d had stashed in her bra. SG 7’s explosive expert takes out the guard barehanded, recouping some of his team’s lost honor in the process.

AR 6’s team leader takes his first look at a goa’uld and has to fight back laughter. It doesn’t help that its peacock feather headdress is ever so slightly crooked.

AR 4’s second incarnation brings with it a captain with a flair for alien vulgarity. At least, Major Patrick thinks it’s vulgarity – nothing whispered so sweetly to a difficult village headman could actually have been sweet. When he asks, he gets a _no sir, of course not, sir_ , for an answer, but the next night, when the captain starts up again, he pronounces everything more clearly, more distinctly, like he’s giving Major Patrick a chance to learn if he wants to. The third night comes complete with gestures and the carefully blank faces of the rest of AR 4. There’s no fourth night, owing to a badly-timed village coup, but during the moonlit sprint for the gate Major Patrick learns several new words from the captain and the engineer as they keep each other moving.

It’s not all during missions, either. The gym is overtaken no less than three times a month by SGC personnel clamoring to learn some new Satedan takedown. Dr. Jones, the geologist from AR 10, chronologically forty two, rubs at the hand-shaped scar on his chest at least twice an hour. His teammates rub at theirs only slightly less often. No one who was on Atlantis for the plague of early May 2012 will voluntarily shake hands; this causes a shitstorm at the IOA until someone possessed with the powers of deductive reasoning points out that an offworld handclasp was how the plague got to Atlantis and that skin-to-skin contact was the main transmission vector.

They still hug, though, and no one’s explained why a hug is safer than a handshake.

Every time there’s a storm forecast for the greater Colorado Springs area, especially if it’s touted as Worst Of The Decade, the Lanteans in the mountain will make cracks about taking off for the weekend. Colonel Mitchell is just grateful he understands this one. He doesn’t know, at least until he goes to Atlantis, why the Lanteans working in the mess sometimes dye the mashed potatoes purple-green and put ginger in the stew, and he nearly sets his sinuses on fire the first time he tries the authentic Athosian hot sauce one lieutenant carries around in a cleaned-out Tabasco bottle.

Atlantis comes with its own set of holidays, too. Rising Day is celebrated with a full-out barbecue hosted by whoever’s renting the house with the largest backyard. Booze is drunk; Satedan battle songs are sung; Athosian dances are danced. Anyone who wants to come is invited, from the general all the way down to the test tube washers in the chemistry department.

Mourning Day is much quieter. A couple of hours before sunset, the Lanteans caravan out into the wilderness. They release their paper lanterns as the sun sets – one for every life lost for Atlantis. Not all of the names scrawled on the side are in English. Not all are from Earth. Eight are blank.

It’s considered an honor to be invited to a Mourning Day hike.

There are things people at the SGC notice about the Lanteans. But that’s okay, because they’re sure there are things the Lanteans notice about them, too.


	2. Chapter 2

The Milky Way leaves scars to rival Pegasus’s, of course: they may not be cut as deeply into mind and soul, but they’re certainly wider, as befitting products of the rapid move from alien to home and back again, and survivors of the worst both galaxies can muster can spot a kindred spirit just from the way their hands quake for coffee at oh-three-hunderd standard Tower time. Atlantis welcomes her peoples’ siblings-in-arms as warmly as her people do, with every weird quirk of little brother syndrome as intact as if John Sheppard had been pulling on her circuits himself, and she, above all, keeps track of each strangeness and each nightmare. Her primary function is to assist, after all.

It’s Atlantis who suggests setting aside the second floor of a residential tower for Milky Way personnel on rotation; Rodney notices the pop-up on his main computer screen, but Atlantis had wisely chosen to send it coded in Punjabi, so Rodney attributes it to Dr. Ramakrishnan and sends it on up the chain with a politely worded email about checking the address bar before sending an email.

It’s Atlantis, too, who keeps the tau’ris’ tower a few degrees cooler rather than subject her step-children to the hyper-humidity of their current planet. Radek is the first to notice the difference, the first to try to correct it, and the first to realize that Atlantis might very well have a mind of her own. He accepts becoming Atlantis’s first choice for broken coffee machine tech support surprisingly well, because even if he does tend to be called out of his bed at oh-three-asscrack, at least he gets delicious coffee out of the deal.

Atlantis tells John, her favorite son, when someone from the Milky Way needs a drink; she tells him to tell Teyla when someone from the Milky Way needs a shoulder, because she is a good mother and good mothers don’t ask things of their children that their children can’t give. Atlantis tells John when Marines are forced back into their own minds by a combination of Wraith, Genii, and PTSD; Atlantis tells John when someones’ alcoholism flares up like an exploding sun; Atlantis tells John when someone has worked themselves far past exhaustion in in the gym or running along the piers. John does’t question it, because he’s been there, too. The Tau’ri also flatly refuse to disturb graves and temples, which is an attitude John thinks the Lanteans could use more of.

Teyla is the first Lantean to break into the tau’ris’ Monday-Thursday-Saturday ancient mythology Jeopardy game, and the first Lantean to take on extra reading to better compete. Though she’ll never say so to the organizers, she thinks the category “People/Places/Animals Zeus Has Fucked (Over)” isn’t all that bad, although privately she wonders at the health of a people whose King of the gods can’t even play at restraint. Corporal McKinnons, after smiling indulgently at Teyla’s frown, tells her that those particular stories are from a long time ago, and, anyways, people turn atheist very quickly in their line of work.

Ronon bonds with an entire platoon within the space of two hours: passers-by report sounds of war poetry echoing from the disused workroom they’d filed into, but none of the participants really talk about it afterwards. Atlantis complies shots from her security cameras of all twenty-three of them gathering around a Kindle at least twice a month, and Ronon starts quoting Odysseus and Athena every chance he gets — in the original Ancient Greek. It drives the linguists mad; they can’t figure out for the life of them how he learned the language so quickly.

It’s difficult, and not really worth it, to dissuade the younger and more impressionable Marines from championing the tau’ri’s Bi-Annual Paintball Training Day, so the Lantean command staff gives in, orders approximately half a million paintballs, and hides some manufactured totem or other in a place of Rodney’s devising. To everyone’s surprise, the worst things that happens are a few rolled ankles and paint stains on Jumper Two.

The tau’ri, when rotated home, leave Pegasus as proud honorary Lanteans.


End file.
